The West methodically crosses each of the lines it had itself drawn, while refusing to contemplate the consequences. This blindness leads directly to Russian retaliation and to direct war.
The Western management of the conflict opposing Russia and Ukraine (supported by NATO) has followed the same pattern since 2022: a solemn declaration sets a limit. A few weeks or months later, that limit is crossed discreetly. Then comes the explanation that the situation has changed, that it was necessary, but that it does not in any way constitute an escalation.
This is how Ukraine received helmets and then body armour, anti-tank missiles and then heavy tanks, Patriot systems and then F-16s. And finally, authorisation to carry out strikes on Russian territory with Western weapons, which constitutes one of the “red lines” most explicitly drawn by Mr Vladimir Putin.
This mechanism rests on two illusions: the first is that Mr Putin is bluffing. His warnings would be rhetorical and could be overridden with a light heart. This idea is nonetheless contradicted by the very fact that Mr Putin decided to launch a war and to pursue it, in spite of heavy human losses and consequences for the Russian economy. The second illusion is the direct consequence of the first: the West believes it can master the scale of escalation. Calibrating weapons deliveries, regulating strike authorisations, keeping the conflict below a threshold of catastrophic response. This belief in the fine management of escalation — a way of playing too clever — ignores an elementary reality of deterrence theory: escalation is not a ladder one climbs step by step at a chosen speed. It is a process in which each actor reacts according to its own doctrine, its own military psychology and its own reading of the adversary’s intentions — not according to the pace the other has set for itself. On another battlefield, the Americans and the Israelis have just had the painful experience of this…
A Belligerent Western Rhetoric
Escalation, as practised by Westerners, is all the more dangerous for being increasingly assumed. The progression of declarations is instructive in this regard.
In March 2022, Ms Kaja Kallas, then Prime Minister of Estonia, was already setting the framework: “If Putin wins, or if he even believes he has won this war, his appetite will only grow.” The register was still that of a warning. In 2023, the tone changed: “Real peace can only be achieved with Russia’s defeat.” This is no longer a warning — it is a war objective formulated by the head of government of an EU member state. In 2024, appointed High Representative of the Union, she declared before the European Parliament: “We will continue to support Ukraine until it wins this war.” The European Union as a whole, through the voice of its chief diplomat, is now pursuing an objective of military victory. In 2025, the language became that of an assumed belligerent: “Putin has no interest in peace, and he will not stop it until he is forced to. The Russian war economy is already weak. We will make it weaker still.” And, in 2026, from Kyiv: “The way to end this war is to confront Moscow, not to reward it. Not to loosen the sanctions, but to tighten them.” Over four years, the drift has been continuous, moving from solidarity with a victim to co-directing a war effort. The word belligerence has not been uttered, but that is indeed the reality.
In Germany, the tone is the same. Mr Boris Pistorius, at the Bundestag on 5 June 2024, declared that Germany had to be “ready for war by 2029”, adding: “We must not believe that Putin will stop at Ukraine’s borders if he achieves his goals.” Mr Roderich Kiesewetter, the Bundestag’s Defence spokesman, called for the official declaration of a state of tension in order to accelerate drone acquisition. Mr Friedrich Merz, receiving Mr Zelensky in Berlin on 28 May 2025, announced that Germany would finance the production in Ukraine of long-range missiles “without any restriction as to their use”, meaning intended to strike deep into Russian territory. This year, Germany committed to a comparable programme to manufacture drones capable of hitting targets at 1,500 km.
German Responsibility
In the German case, this reality is set within a very dark historical context that German leaders have chosen to ignore. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, causing 27 million Soviet deaths. Leningrad — today Saint Petersburg, a city that Ukrainian drones financed by Berlin strike regularly — endured a siege of 872 days. Yet the memory of the Great Patriotic War is in Russia the founding narrative of national identity, the criterion against which every external threat is still measured. Under these conditions, how is Russian power supposed to perceive these military partnerships that daily cause the deaths of Russians, including civilians?
Added to this is the fact that Germany bears heavy responsibility for the events that led to the war. Jeffrey Sachs, professor at Columbia, has demonstrated this rigorously. He reminds us regularly, without prompting any European awakening, that in 1990 the German government promised explicitly and repeatedly to the Soviet leadership that NATO would not expand eastwards, in the context of German reunification, before breaking its word — just as, of course, the United States government did.
Attacking the Russian Nuclear Triad
The Western camp did not limit itself to conventional deep strikes. It took an even greater risk by attacking Russian nuclear deterrence. There exists in deterrence doctrine a rule that forty years of the Cold War and a decade of arms control treaties seemed to have engraved in every mind: one does not touch the components of the adversary’s nuclear triad. Not the silos. Not the submarines. Not the strategic bombers. Not, above all, the early-warning radars that give the command the time to distinguish a nuclear attack from a mere incident — for altering this capacity increases the chances that the adversary will make an error of judgement and decide to launch retaliatory strikes.
Ukraine, with Western weapons and thanks to Western intelligence, defied this prohibition on two occasions. On 22 and 26 May 2024, drones struck two sites of the Voronezh network, the early-warning system allowing Russia to detect ballistic missile launches at distances of up to 6,000 kilometres. On 1 June 2025, Operation “Spider’s Web” destroyed or degraded more than 40 strategic bombers — Tu-95s, Tu-160s and Tu-22M3s — at four Russian strategic aviation bases — the airborne pillar of the nuclear triad — at an estimated cost of 7 billion dollars, representing approximately one third of Russia’s long-range strike fleet. These aircraft are irreplaceable, Russia no longer possessing the industrial base to rebuild these models.
The danger has been analysed by theorists of nuclear deterrence, and it is great: if Moscow perceives that its retaliatory capacity has been degraded to the point where its nuclear deterrence becomes less credible, the pressure in favour of a pre-emptive strike increases. The Western leaders who permitted — and no doubt even encouraged — these strikes have placed a bet that their Cold War predecessors would have judged senseless.
Restoring Deterrence
In fact, these deep strikes on the Russian nuclear triad have not been without consequences for the strategic debate at the Kremlin. They have considerably strengthened the position of those who, since 2022, have considered that Moscow’s restraint has been interpreted by the West not as wisdom, but as an invitation to go further. Mr Sergei Lavrov himself had warned in March 2025 that “Germany was playing with fire”, as it was considering delivering Taurus missiles to Ukraine, before adding that Russia would respond “asymmetrically” to any new escalation.
What form would this asymmetric response take if Western pressure continued to grow? Russian strategists have constructed a doctrine of graduated escalation: the first rung would be a new use of the Oreshnik — in conventional form — against Ukrainian targets of high symbolic or military value, to demonstrate that the system is operational and that restraint has limits. The second envisaged rung would be conventional strikes against NATO countries directly participating in the attacks — Estonia, which hosts intelligence and cyber-offensive coordination centres, being explicitly identified as a potential target. Drone factories in Germany — whose Brave Germany programme now constitutes a direct military-industrial cooperation with Ukraine — would enter into this logic. The third rung would be the use of a tactical nuclear weapon against a NATO country, chosen for its maximum psychological and diplomatic impact.
In Russia these ideas have influential defenders, such as Mr Sergei Karaganov, a long-standing adviser to the Kremlin and honorary president of the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy — who, it should be noted, often expresses positions that the Kremlin prefers not to formulate officially. In an interview on the Tucker Carlson Show in January 2026, he declared that nuclear weapons were “a sin, but necessary”, and that Russia should use them “to bring European elites back to reason”.
In Russia in Global Politics, the reference journal of Russian strategists, Mr Dmitri Trenin expresses a similar idea: “The Americans and their allies are in fact playing Russian roulette. The inhibiting fear of the atomic bomb, present throughout the second half of the twentieth century, has disappeared. Nuclear weapons have been taken out of the game. The practical conclusion is obvious: fear must be brought back into geopolitics.”
Western leaders are wrong to ignore the debates currently taking place in Russia on this question. The ideas of Mr Karaganov and Mr Trenin have an increasing number of supporters, not only in governing circles, but also in civil society. Now, even a moderate such as Maxim Yusin, geopolitical commentator for Kommersant, criticises Moscow’s responses as too cautious in the face of Ukrainian drone attacks carried out with Western assistance.
Lex Talionis
On 17 May 2026, Ukraine launched one of the most massive attacks since the beginning of the conflict — approximately 600 drones in a single night — killing at least three people on the outskirts of Moscow. On 22 May, it struck a vocational school in Starobilsk, in the Luhansk region, killing twelve people — including teenagers aged 14 to 18. On 23 May 2026, it struck several energy and industrial sites deep in Russian territory, damaging in particular the Cheskharis oil terminal in the port of Novorossiysk, as well as a chemical plant in Perm Krai. When they did not openly celebrate the “success” of these Ukrainian strikes, Western media justified them and framed them positively. European chancelleries remained silent. In contrast, Mr Lavrov promised a retaliation that was “inevitable and severe”.
That retaliation has just taken place. In the night of 23 to 24 May, Russia struck Ukraine with 90 missiles and 600 drones, targeting in particular Kyiv and its region, killing four people, and this time provoking the indignation of Western political figures and media. But it is not on the practice of double standards, to which there has been time to grow accustomed, that one should dwell this time. It is on the fact that, for the third time since the beginning of the conflict, Moscow used its hypersonic Oreshnik missile — with nuclear capability — against the Bila Tserkva district. This constitutes a message sent to Europe. Perhaps the last warning before escalation.
What is worrying is that this message, clear though it is, does not appear to have been received. Ms Kallas has just announced that European Union foreign ministers will meet this week to discuss means of “increasing pressure” on Russia… Where will this mechanism lead? Do European peoples truly wish for the direct war with Russia towards which their leaders appear to be driving them? For it is one thing to support Ukraine financially and diplomatically, and quite another to wage war alongside it.
A Possible Breaking Point: the St Petersburg International Economic Forum
The St Petersburg International Economic Forum will be held from 3 to 6 June 2026. Putin will preside over the plenary session. Some 13,500 participants are expected, including delegations from 144 countries. St Petersburg is less than 700 kilometres from the Ukrainian border — a trivial range for drones that have already struck strategic bases 4,000 kilometres away.
What will happen if a drone financed by European funds, guided by Western intelligence, strikes the Expoforum while Putin is presiding over the plenary session? The gravity of such an act would immeasurably exceed that of a strike on a refinery or an early-warning radar. It would no doubt be perceived as an assassination attempt on the Russian president, or as an attack on a gathering of international envoys. In that case, it is unlikely that the Russian response would remain calibrated by criteria of military proportionality…
This scenario is neither desirable nor inevitable, but it is plausible. And that it is plausible is the direct consequence of a promise not kept made to Gorbachev in 1990 and of four years of crossing red lines, from the attack on the Russian nuclear triad to the drones financed and designed by a country that killed 27 million Soviets.
